Integrating Your CRM with Marketing Automation Can Turn Your Business into a Well-Oiled Sales and Marketing Machine

Managing different sales and marketing databases can be difficult – especially when you want to measure campaign effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). However, by integrating your CRM with marketing automation, you can streamline processes, free up your team to close more deals, and ultimately help your business grow faster.

By integrating the two systems, the sales and marketing teams become better aligned. Having a single platform allows the seamless transfer of lead information and ensures everyone is working from the same playbook. It also fosters communication between the departments and ensures you’re presenting prospects with the right messages at the right time, improving the effectiveness of your inbound campaigns and delivering a greater ROI.

The benefits of syncing marketing automation with the CRM can be seen throughout the entire sales process.

Quick and Easy Research into New Website Leads

Most marketing automation platforms can track web visitor actions like social media engagement, page views, and form completions. Seem a little stalkerish? Yes, well, as long as we’re not using it for evil.

Marketers can do good things, like helping buyers solve their problems. By understanding more about our buyers’ journey and behavior, we’re able to better understand their pain points, interests and motivations, and offer the best content that resonates with them and helps them find solutions to their problems.

When the marketing tools are integrated with a CRM, those visitor behaviors are carried over to the sales teams so they’re able to identify the better leads depending on where they are in the buying cycle and then personalize each sales experience accordingly.

Improve Lead Quality by Automatically Scoring Leads Based on Behavior

For lead scores to work well, it requires a little bit of research on past sales in order to understand your ideal customer’s “typical” path to purchase. Once you can identify the typical actions that are taken prior to a closed deal, you can translate each of those actions into points.

For instance (a very simplified instance), you notice that all your closed deals have buyers that:

Download a piece of content by filling out a form

Typically visit between 5-8 web pages

Most of them have clicked something you’ve shared on Twitter

They typically read your About page

They always visit the Pricing page

Take that information and add a points score to each action.

Download a piece of content by filling out a form – 10 points

Typically visit between 5-8 web pages – 2 points per page

Most of them have clicked something you’ve shared on Twitter – 5 points

They typically read your About page – 3 points

They always visit the pricing page – 5 points

From there, you could assume an average number of points someone who might be close to making a purchase decision might be between 25-39 points. Based on this information, you could make sure the sales team is notified of any lead as soon as it reaches a 25-point lead score.

Communication between sales and marketing is the key to effective lead scoring. Both teams should work together to determine qualified lead scores. From there, marketing can develop targeted content to attract ideal prospects, and pass them on to sales once they reach that specific score.

With the improved lead quality afforded to sales, they won’t waste time on leads that aren’t ready to convert. Instead, sales can spend time educating qualified leads and building credibility. As sales focuses more on qualified leads, conversion rates will ultimately grow. Not only are they able to close deals faster, the customers with whom they’ve built relationships will end up being better, lifetime customers.

Nurture Cold Leads Automatically

Not all leads are good leads. Some need to be nurtured (and some may need to be passed on entirely). Just because a visitor found your website, read a few blogs, or even connected with you on social media, they may not necessarily be looking to buy. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re a lost cause. With an automated system, marketing can send a sequence of nurturing emails designed to keep your brand top-of-mind until the not-so-great-prospects are ready to purchase.

That point of readiness could be defined by a certain amount of time or some other predetermined trigger event. The point is, the prospect isn’t ignored just because they’re not ready to pull the trigger. Instead, they’re nurtured with helpful content that can eventually help move them further along the buyer’s journey.

Comprehensive Reporting

Sales and marketing can now tell one story – a comprehensive look at campaign effectiveness and ROI. The two systems working together provide an insight into your entire customer journey – from prospect to lead to customer. Marketing can identify which lead sources are producing the most customers and what content has the highest conversion rates in order to track the efficacy of their marketing campaigns, identifying the most highly-effective marketing strategies.

Sales teams can analyze which outreach attempts perform the best, how individual salespeople are performing, and the average length of the sales cycle.

Integrating CRM and marketing automation systems provides an excellent platform for sales and marketing to seamlessly and effectively move leads through the sales funnel. Aligning the two systems makes sharing information a breeze and it makes both teams work more efficiently.

If you want to learn how to identify and nurture your leads effectively to drive more sales, contact us to discuss how you might be able to better align your sales and marketing teams.